We were snowbound at a corporate retreat in Princeton, New Jersey. We had exhausted the formal agenda and were waiting to hear if the snowploughs had freed the I-95 so that we could get to the airport and go home.

So we were having a few beers and having a general discussion about what works for us in business when Kevin, an experienced colleague who worked in our manufacturing practice, said something so true and so simple that it has stuck with me at every step of my career since.

We were talking about creating and keeping customer relationships, and he said: “Every time I’m going to meet someone for business, before I go in, I ask myself, ‘how can I create value for them in this meeting?’ If I can do this, I know they’ll want to meet me again. They’ll learn to trust me. And, when the time is right, they’ll buy from me.”

The snowploughs came and we put down our beers and caught our planes home, but his simple mantra – ‘how can I create value for my customers each time we meet?’ – has served me well since then.

Because this is the secret of customer experience.

If we want to make the customer experience better, it’s simple. We make every customer encounter something that our customer values. Then we repeat for every step of the encounter.

Offering control to our customer (of the conversation, of the transaction)

Making it so that there is only one way for the customer to do something – and it’s always good

Being patient

Making it easy to pay

Making it easy to get money back

Pricing fairly

Being consistent

Making it easy to talk to a person (if that is what our customer wants)

Making it easy not to have to talk to a person (if that is what our customer wants)

Making it easy for the customer to change their mind

Welcoming returns with a smile

Improvising if the customer needs it

Anticipating their questions (nicely)

Listening to them. REALLY listening. (Note: this one is hard).

Being honest

If we can’t do it, saying so

If someone else can do it better or cheaper, saying so

Pricing things in ways that are clear and easy to understand

No surprises – being up front with bad news and what we are doing to fix it

If there is a quick or cheap fix for their problem, solving it for them

Refusing to sell them the wrong thing

Keeping our promises, no matter how small (especially the small ones)

Being interesting

Being funny (but not offensive)

Speak about their problems more than our solutions

Helping

Explaining what is happening and what will happen next

Putting ourselves in their shoes

Giving them meaningful choices

Tailoring what we do to what they want

Keeping their anonymity (if that is what they want)

Reassuring them

Taking responsibility for sorting things out, even if it is not our fault

Solving their problems quickly and consistently

Giving them something

Offering something extra (a lagniappe, for example)

Giving away insight or knowledge because the customer needs help

Letting them take the credit

Giving them things because we think they might like them

Making it cheaper because they’ve come back

Accepting that if they have got things wrong, it’s our fault for allowing it to happen

Speed

Being fast

Being instant

Letting them be slow. Waiting for them. Patiently. And with a smile.

Being convenient in ways that matter to them

Asking them how quickly they want it and getting it to them whenever they say

Each of these will make the customer experience better. Better, customers will value dealing with us. And if there’s value, they’ll be willing to buy from us. And they’ll want to do it again. And this is the bottom-line reason why customer experience matters.

You can’t control the customer experience.

You can’t control customers’ feelings, or their personal circumstances, or how much attention they are going to pay to you. Their experience of your brand, or your product, or your service is down to how they feel. And you can’t control their feelings.

But you can make it better

You can control how you maximise the chances that the experience is positive.

Here are ten examples of what I mean, described, of course, from the customer’s perspective. If you make any of these better, your typical customer’s experience will improve.

You’re quick.Waiting is a cost to me, the customer. It’s a cost that I don’t want to incur. Whatever I want, I want it now. The more you can get me what I want straightaway, the more I like it. (Delay also makes it more likely that things will go wrong, and I don’t like that).

You are easy to deal with. Whatever I want to do is so easy I don’t have to think about it. I get the information or the product or the service or the support I want in the ways that I want it.

You get it right. What you sell me is what I want. And what I want is what I get. And it doesn’t go wrong.

You care if something isn’t right. If it does go wrong, I want you to know before I do. I want you to fix it with no inconvenience on my part. And I want you to put right anything that went bad because your product went wrong, before I have to ask.

You prove that I can trust you. I want to know, before I buy, that I can trust you. You give me value anytime I engage with you, whether I am buying from you or not. If every encounter with you provides insight, advice or help in ways that matter to me, then I’ll trust you with my money when it’s time to buy.

You trust me.You don’t behave as if I am a thief or a fraudster. You acknowledge, listen and act on what I tell you. If you need to do things to make things secure, you explain why and you do your best to make it easy and trouble-free. You take my side.

You are honest about what you can’t do. If you can’t help me then you let me know so I don’t waste time or have incorrect expectations. And then you help me in whatever way you can.

You act in my interests. If something is better for me than what you are offering or what I am requesting, you let me know and you help me with it.

Improve any one of these things and you will make the customer experience better. In addition, you will cut your costs of sale and service and make your people happier. Improve all ten, and the experience you offer may well become the stuff of legend.

(I wrote this and then discovered Seth Godin’s wonderful post: Your call is very important to us which covers related ground, but with added goodness (I love the idea of routing delayed calls to the CEO’s spouse…) Enjoy).

The Language of Love

Words need to match expectations if we want our relationships to succeed.

Valentine’s Day reminds me how much the language of love corresponds to the business of engaging with customers.

Love is about building enduring relationships, where both parties feel like equals, where they each give and get something from the relationship. It is about two-way communication. It is about trust. It is about wanting to invest our time in the relationship, because doing so rewards us now and because we want it to do so in the future.

For most organisations, this also describes the relationship we would like to have with our customers (and more importantly, the relationship we would like them to have with us).

But, as many of us have learned to the cost of our broken hearts, this isn’t easy.

Chores vs Candlelight

While people can say the right things, what we say through the candlelight over dinner with a nice wine can be very different to what we do on a wet Wednesday evening when the chores need doing and we’re both tired after a long day at work.

And if we can take out the rubbish without being asked, or do the dishes and still smile because we want to cheer our partner up and maybe feel a little better ourselves, then – while candlelit dinners are all very nice – it is when we stand in the rain by the bin or at the sink up to our elbows in dishwater that we don’t just talk about love, we show it.

And showing our love is what counts.

Caring is Doing

We can love our customers during the sale, as we smile and show them our brochures and we give them the pitch and they get excited that maybe the thing we are offering might be the one, the thing that they are seeking.

But are we ready to work at this relationship? To show our love rather than just talk about it?

We do so when we let them call us for help and we answer in person, not with a computer; when we design our website to make it easy for them to do what they want, rather than just get what we want to tell them; when we remember their name and know what they have bought from us and recognise that even the smallest thing can cause frustration; and when we say “don’t worry about it” and give them their money back with a smile when they tell us they aren’t happy.

The experience we offer our customers shows how we care about them much more than any words we use.

Real relationships don’t happen just because we dress up nice and say we care, they happen because the things we do in the weeks and months and years after that first date show we care.

A gap in trust

When customers complain, they expect that the people to whom they speak will be able to handle it. But this can only happen if our organisations trust customer service agents to use their judgement, initiative and discretion to do so.

But this is rare.

How do we know it’s rare?

Because too many times the agent has to hide behind phrases like: “…it’s our policy, I’m afraid,” or “…these are the only options I can offer you,” or “…let me speak to my supervisor.”

In other words, our people could resolve the problem, but our policy and procedures get in the way.

Why do we do this? Because we don’t trust our people.

We don’t trust them to do the right thing, so we constrain them by procedures.

We don’t trust them to do what is necessary to fix things, so we require them to escalate to supervisors.

We don’t trust them to make the right decisions, so we remove their discretion.

Our agents become a barrier between the customer and resolution of their problem. Worse, agents know this, so they feel frustrated and grumpy.

Does the customer pick up on this? Of course they do.

So, instead of making things better for the customer, we make it more likely that we will make an already unhappy customer even more unhappy.

The trust trade-off

Yes, of course, there is a need to have consistent processes so that we can offer consistent standards of service quality. And, yes, I know that service is a cost and we need to make sure that we manage our costs with discipline and attention. And yes, of course, we know that if we give our agents free rein, we might incur liabilities and risks which may not be acceptable.

So we accept these constraints. And we require that our people work to them.

And by doing so, we assume that value we gain in meeting these needs outweighs the damage these constraints cause to trust: damage to our trust in our people, and damage to our customers’ trust in our brand.

And yet. And yet…

A different trust model

Is giving agents discretion over customer interactions very different from offering a quibble-free guarantee for returns as offered by (say) Marks and Spencers, Lands’ End or (most famously) Zappos?

Not in intent. Yes, such guarantees open these organisations up to abuse, but their success shows that losses through abuse are more than outweighed by the increase in brand perception, trust – and sales.

Perhaps we need to think about this trust thing differently.

So come on. If we want customers to trust us, then maybe we need to think about trusting the people we employ to work with customers to make things better.